Exclusive Rights

Kallidora Rho

“What do you mean, they own your pussy?”

Lyla’s voice cracked with dismayed humor as she admired her girlfriend, the woman to whom she had given her heart, reclining on the couch and removing her bandages. Humor, because clearly it had to be some kind of joke. Dismayed, because the look in Tracy’s eyes was anything but humorous.

“I’m not really sure how else to put it, babe.” Tracy winced, distracted by her soreness as she peeled layers of pristine, white padding away from her hips. “They paid for it, they own it. Isn’t that how the world works?”

“No!” Lyla replied, aghast. “Of course not! This is your body, Trace!”

“Yeah.” A look of unspeakable euphoria washed over Tracy’s face as she cast her gaze down at her new anatomy. “Yeah, it finally is.”

The warm glow on her face was an extended hand, all but begging Lyla to join her in the celebration. A tempting offer indeed. She had never seen her girlfriend so happy or so at ease with herself. They’d both spent years envisaging this moment: the moment Tracy came home after her bottom surgery and peeled off her bandages after her first stint of recovery in hospital. Their surroundings were as modest—as shitty—as ever: a lumpy, uncomfortable couch made of the kind of fabric that always catches unpleasantly on your fingernails, framed by four thin walls and a low, yellowed stucco ceiling, each surface tinged with stains from mold that was there before Lyla was even born and that resisted all cleaning. But for all its many, many flaws, the small, aging rowhouse was theirs—at least, as much as the landlord would allow—and hard-won through Lyla’s long, grueling stints delivering food on the back of her bike, out in the rain. She’d been saving towards Tracy’s GRS fund too, but that had always seemed years away, her own surgery further off still. Until Speyka.

Upstairs, the house stirred. Something beat against the walls, frenzied, the scrabbling of a hundred hands, hard enough to make beams creak and send dust scattering through the air. It sounded like the house was growing, somehow, top-heavy as if from a tumor, swelling to admit its new, cancerous bulk.

Lyla already knew that if she looked from outside, she’d see nothing. She decided the noise was nothing more than a bird that had somehow made its way into the attic. That happened sometimes.

“But…” Lyla licked her lips. They felt like dry sand. It was so tempting to simply move on from the issue and enjoy Tracy’s happiness. But how could she, after being told that her girlfriend’s new pussy literally belonged to someone else? “This… this is just a joke, right? I mean, yeah, Speyka paid. I get that. A-and I’m grateful. Obviously. But that doesn’t mean she. You know. Owns it.”

The creaking upstairs rose in volume.

“Of course it does.” Though still distracted, Tracy seemed faintly cross. Like a parent reaching the limit of patience with a child’s needling questioning. “That was the agreement.”

“As like… a kink thing?” Lyla grasped. That would have been bad, but manageably bad. She’d have wanted to talk about it first, but it wasn’t like the two of them were exclusive.

Tracy laughed, and Lyla had the distinct sense that she was being laughed at. “I don’t know, babe. Is it a kink thing when you buy a bicycle and keep it locked up so nobody else gets to ride it?”

That sounded like a joke too, but Lyla could tell otherwise. Tracy’s demeanor suggested no irony at all. Everything she had told Lyla, she said with the utter, offhanded sincerity of somebody pointing out that the sky was blue or that day followed night. Whatever the hell she was talking about, she meant it.

“So… Speyka owns your pussy?” Lyla tested, keeping her disgust and derision as muted as she could. She had never heard of anything like this, but Tracy’s deadly seriousness was infectious.

“Yeah.” Tracy winced as she pulled the last of her bandages away. “Obviously.”

Beneath the padded dressings was nothing more or less than had been promised: a perfect, surgically-sculpted pussy. Exactly what Tracy had always wanted, and exactly what she’d cried herself to sleep at night so many times for lacking. Lyla stared for a moment in wonder. She was no expert, but she had done enough research to know that it was remarkable—magical, even—how perfectly it was already healing. Lyla wasn’t sure where Speyka had taken Tracy for the surgery, but clearly her girlfriend’s patron could afford the very best care. Lyla quashed a little kernel of resentment at the thought. She was happy for Tracy, of course. She wanted her girlfriend to have this, even if she’d always imagined that she’d be the one to provide. And given how distant Tracy had seemed lately, Lyla had certainly been excited to explore a little more intimacy with her, with dysphoria less pervasive an obstacle. On one side, at least.

Suddenly, she wasn’t sure if that was on the cards.

“OK.” Lyla nodded slowly. “And what does that actually mean?”

That seemed, at last, to give Tracy pause—but not trouble. “I dunno,” she replied nonchalantly, after a moment. “I guess you’d have to ask them.”

Her eyes were on herself. On her new anatomy. Her face was radiant, eyes starry and mouth in a wide, crescent-moon grin. Something green and awful threatened to writhe in Lyla’s gut.

“Oh!” Tracy had a visible lightbulb moment. “But it does mean that nobody else can touch it. Obviously.”

Lyla froze. Her chest, suddenly hollow, clenched tight. It was like her heart had stopped. Like it was gone.

“What do you mean?” she asked, horror leeching into her voice.

“I meant exactly what I said.” Tracy giggled like it was nothing at all. “Duh.”

“B-but…” Lyla’s sinking stomach clawed up at her adrenal gland. “I’m your girlfriend, Trace.”

A frown flickered across Tracy’s face for the briefest of moments. Something upstairs clattered and groaned.

“That’s true,” Tracy admitted, a touch regretfully. “But… it’s just the way it is, I guess.” The silence that followed her thought-terminating proclamation left her as restless as it did Lyla dismayed. The restless need to rationalize prompted her to speak again. “I mean, yeah, you’re my girlfriend. But it’s my body, you know? It’s not like you’re entitled to it.”

It was a mercy that Lyla’s incredulity wrested her out of the grip of her anxiety. “You just said that Speyka owns your pussy!”

For a few seconds, she hoped that the overwhelming contradiction in Tracy’s words would shock her back to sanity. Instead, the storm of tension passed quickly from her face, and she relaxed back into a place of placid acceptance. “Well, yeah. Because she paid for it. That’s different.”

Lyla was at the point of screaming in frustration. Instead, with the noises upstairs growing louder and closer, she was simply eager to get to the heart of the matter. “So I can’t touch your pussy? Ever?”

“Well, you’d have to ask Speyka.”

“But do you want me to touch you there?”

“I…” Tracy shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not against it. I guess.”

“You guess?” Lyla pressed.

“It just… seems a little inappropriate.” There was an evident reluctance in the way Tracy felt forced to dig into the contorted mire of her mind to elaborate her feelings. “Since it’s someone else’s.”

Lyla couldn’t let that lie. She had to get past it. “Look, Trace,” she began. “It’s up to you. Not… not them. You. So if you’re willing to let me, then I’d really, really like to.”

Tracy seemed torn between two poles. Eventually, hesitantly, she nodded. “Well… I guess, personally, I’m happy to let you try.”

Lyla couldn’t make sense of why she’d inflected it like that, but it seemed not to matter. She had permission. Consent. She decided to push past the awkward air and reach down, toward her girlfriend’s new anatomy. Not for anything invasive or penetrative. Just a touch. A caress. Just something to dispel the nonsense Tracy had come home babbling.

A fraction of an inch away from Tracy’s fresh, tender skin, Lyla’s fingertips froze in the air.

She tried again. And again. And again. But no matter how hard, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t touch her girlfriend’s pussy. It was denied to her—and not by any physical restraint or force field. By sheer taboo, one so inviolate it was etched into the base of her brain and into each and every motor neurone.

You don’t touch something that doesn’t belong to you.

It had been drilled into Lyla’s head since childhood. And while she’d never considered herself a scrupulous rule-follower, in this instance the revulsion she felt at the prospect of sullying someone else’s possession by laying hands on it was utterly insurmountable. It was ingrained on a level deeper than bone. It was woven into the bedrock of reality itself, and Lyla’s very being bent to its weight whether she wanted to or not. She could scarcely process the experience, but her inability to push beyond a certain threshold was undeniable.

“Why…” Lyla breathed, incredulous and desperate. “C-can’t… I…”

She already knew the answer. She couldn’t touch Tracy’s pussy because it wasn’t hers to touch. Lyla didn’t accept that, obviously. But all the same, it made a certain, appalling sense. It was true, it seemed—and the truth didn’t care if she accepted it or not. Lyla had a thousand questions about what all this meant—about how this was even possible—but as pressingly fundamental as those seemed, they immediately began to fade into fatalistic background noise. Whatever had happened to Tracy was becoming unquestionable, in the same way that it never really occurred to Lyla to question why gravity worked, or how electricity was possible.

“I told you,” Tracy told her, almost pityingly. “That part of me belongs to Speyka now.”

The noise from upstairs changed. The endless, growth-pain groaning subsided, but was replaced by a set of distinct, descending creaks. Something was coming down the stairs. Their lodger. Lyla tensed. She had agreed to their presence, but reluctantly, and that was before she had heard or seen the particularities of the deal Tracy had made. Someone crashing in their attic room for a little while to oversee Tracy’s recovery had been a difficult prospect to argue with, especially given the level of investment it represented. But that didn’t mean Lyla had to like it. And she liked it now less than ever.

“Hello, dolls,” Speyka cooed, as they waltzed into the room. “I’m sorry to crash your little reunion, but it’s high time for a little post-surgical care.”

It was Lyla’s first look at her girlfriend’s strange benefactor—she hadn’t noticed them moving in, oddly—and she did not like what she saw. Raven-haired and viciously tall, Speyka had huge, amber eyes and a long, beak-like nose that protruded far in front of her vanishingly thin lips. Her outfit was peculiar; she wore a suit with an old-fashioned cut, black over white, made of a strange, feathered fabric that seemed morphed to a deep, iridescent emerald at its tails. It was a formal look, but oddly shabby, too; Lyla was put in mind of a bond salesman on hard times, flaunting what little success they had left in a dozen highly-polished silver rings to create the impression of opulence. Speyka walked with a slow, dainty gait as she made her way over to Tracy’s bedside, and any lingering charity Lyla might have felt for the creature that had arranged her girlfriend’s surgery was banished by the brief but utterly warped smirk Speyka flashed her on the way.

“What did you do?” Lyla demanded quietly.

“Hm?” Speyka barely glanced in her direction. “You know exactly what I did, doll. I bought a cunt.” They turned their attention back to Tracy, and plucked a small case filled with phallic silicone objects of various sizes from within one of their cavernous pockets. “Time to dilate, sweetheart. I want to get full depth and function out of you.”

Tracy’s charmed giggle was a choke chain around Lyla’s heartstrings.

“Look, you… you helped my girlfriend get GRS,” Lyla kept her voice as measured as she could. “I’m grateful. Really. Thank you. But why can’t I-”

“Why can’t you touch it?” Speyka shook their head and tutted theatrically. Their fingers were oh-so long, and their fingernails sharp talons. “My, my. I didn’t realize the girlfriend was so light-fingered.”

Lyla flinched. “What the fuck do you-”

“Because I own it, doll!” Speyka crowed. “Bought, paid, signed in triplicate. Is that really so hard to understand?”

At that, Lyla was simply lost for words. It was—and yet, it wasn’t. Something deep within herself hearkened to the simple, brutal logic Speyka presented. Besides, with Tracy nodding along agreeably, it was difficult not to feel that she was the insane one in the room, not they. As Lyla fought for a clear head, Speyka rubbed the length of the dilator they had selected slick with lube, then moved it into position against Tracy’s new entrance. Lyla’s girlfriend was, very visibly, a willing and eager participant.

“I suppose so,” Speyka sighed. “Then allow me to explain. Free of charge. Reality is what you make of it, doll. Hot and cold. Light and dark. Up and down. They’re not out there. They’re in here.” They tapped the side of their head. “Just as long as everybody agrees, anyway. Otherwise, you’re just crazy. Reality is what you all make of it. It’s a matter of consensus. And you’ve all made something utterly wonderful.” With a sweep of her arm, she gestured, and Tracy had the sense that Speyka was indicating so much more than the dismal wall opposite her. That she was gesturing beyond, to the countless banks, offices, and shops that stretched all the way to Wall Street and beyond. “One beautiful, magical law: everything is for sale, and whoever foots the bill reaps the reward. It’s so much simpler than the way things used to work. Sure, there’s some wiggle room here and there when disagreement abounds. But right here? I think we have a perfect little consensus on who paid for what.”

In the wake of Speyka’s little speech, Lyla was speechless. The ideology Speyka presented was as monstrous as it was remorseless, and Lyla was only just beginning to summon a coherent retort when the silence was broken by Tracy’s throaty groans as Speyka slowly inserted the dilator all the way inside her new cunt, pausing for a moment to gently but possessively stroke Tracy’s newly-formed clit.

They, clearly, could touch it.

And Speyka did more with their touch than merely dilate Tracy. She made a whole, mocking ritual out of the penetration. Out of the way Tracy writhed with fresh sensation as Speyka buried the dilator deep inside her, Speyka’s free, talon-like hand beckoning her to stillness with soft caresses, and of the way they drew back from time to time, only to select a new, larger dilator and drive it deeper still, cooing to Tracy with their awful, sing-song voice about how deep, how tight, how beautiful her new pussy was. It was awful to watch, and worst of all was the way Tracy so clearly loved it all. She loved the way Speyka was using and exploring her, and loved how her benefactor turned it all into some sick, teasing pleasure-game. The only reason Lyla stayed to watch at all was out of a misbegotten sense that it would be even worse if she left the room and let the sounds alone, filtered through the thin walls, fertilize her imagination.

Desperate to feel a part of the moment, she shuffled awkwardly into place so that she could hold Tracy’s hand while Speyka was between her legs. Tracy barely even spared her a glance.

They weren’t exclusive. But who wouldn’t feel jealous at such a moment, watching another woman ravish what Lyla could, apparently, never have? Lyla tried to keep a smile on her face, fixed there as though etched in bronze but corroding endlessly as the little muscles in her cheeks ratcheted tighter. Did Tracy really have to keep moaning like that? Did she really have to enjoy it all so much? A poisonous little bird inside her head was ready with the answer: of course she did. Speyka owned her pussy, and owned things loved to be used. What else were they for? Why on Earth wouldn’t Tracy enjoy each and every moment?

This was simply the way the world worked. It was simply correct for it to be this way.

As the sordid scene wore on, Lyla drank deeper and deeper of that awful thought. She didn’t want to, but Speyka’s twisted worldview beat against her like a thousand hummingbird wings, easy to ignore until the totality of it drowned the remainder of her reason. As much as she tried to lay an anchor of common sense deep within herself, it could not seem to strike the sea floor. The more she watched, the more she lost track of everything that had, mere minutes ago, seemed so intuitive and sensible. Older convictions meant nothing whatsoever in the face of all that Speyka had wrought. And with Lyla sinking into fatalistic acceptance, consensus held firm. Reality was settled.

Speyka owned Tracy’s cunt.

After thirty torturous minutes, it was finally over. With a wet slick, Speyka withdrew the latest dilator from Tracy’s pussy—from their pussy—wiped it clean, and set it back in its case. Tracy was left to shudder and twitch for a moment, face flushed and full with delirious afterglow. Lyla simply stood there, numb to it all. Or rather, she was trying to be.

“T-that was amazing,” Tracy panted. “I… I never knew what it would be like to feel full that way.”

Lyla’s chest felt utterly hollow. Like her heart had vanished into the abyss. All the same, something green and sickly pumped through her veins.

“You were amazing, doll,” Speyka cooed. “Thanks to me. I always provide the best, if I do say so myself. Or your money back.” They laughed at their own miserable joke.

“That’s the last thing I want,” Tracy replied ardently. Speyka paused; their head tilted.

“In that case, if you happen to be interested in more,” Speyka ventured, “I have other services at my wingtips.”

The thought of what more Speyka might do pushed Lyla beyond the numbness she had been trying so hard to immure herself in. “H-how long,” she choked out, “until I-I can touch her like that?”

Tracy, still in her post-coital afterglow, gurgled a happy little giggle. Speyka fixed Lyla with a look that might have been sympathetic, if not for the thief’s fire dancing in their amber eyes.

“Poor thing,” they cooed. “If only you’d been able to afford her pussy instead.”

***

From then on, Lyla worked herself to the bone. It made sense twice over. If she pushed herself to spend longer on the clock and make more deliveries, she’d have a little more to line her savings with at the end of each month. And perhaps, one day, she’d save up enough to be able to buy her girlfriend’s pussy back from Speyka. The thought still sounded like delirious nonsense every time she echoed it to herself, but between sleep deprivation and jealous angst, her life was nothing more than an unending state of delirium. What other hope did she have to cling to? Lyla loved Tracy, and this was the only way she would ever get to love her properly again.

The other reason it made sense was that if she was out delivering food, Lyla didn’t have to be around to watch or listen to Speyka helping her girlfriend dilate.

It had been months now, and the pleasure they both took in the process never seemed to diminish. Lyla had less of a stomach for it than ever, but equally little grounds on which to object. After all, Tracy needed to dilate—and Speyka owned her pussy. What more was there to say?

She’d tried to find healthy medicine for her jealousy by trying to initiate a little intimacy with Tracy herself. Tracy assented a few times, however disinterestedly, but the issue of her body’s ownership came inevitably between them. Lyla could not touch what she yearned for most, and Tracy could not turn to her to pleasure the new focus of her sexuality. However it began, each encounter ended the same way: with Tracy on the bed, alone, pleasuring herself, while Lyla simply watched, masturbating as best she could before curdling resentment turned her erection limp despite all attempts at chemical fortification.

It only got worse once Speyka bought Tracy’s tits too.

The hollow-hearted nausea Lyla had known before was nothing compared to what she felt when Tracy left for the night, then returned the next morning with implants and one of Speyka’s arms draped across her shoulder. Tracy’s new tits—Speyka’s new tits—looked perfect on her, and made her almost as happy as GRS had, but Lyla could not summon up even a mote of joy behind her forced grin. She was watching her girlfriend become conquered territory, the borders of each annexed region demarcated by surgical scars and the unbending taboo of ownership. Lyla’s horror drowned any lingering questions about where Tracy’s surgeries were taking place, or why they healed so quickly.

One fleeting attempt at a playful grope was enough for Lyla to know that she would never again be able to touch her girlfriend’s new tits either. By then, she’d already stopped questioning Speyka’s power. Speyka’s ownership.

She’d considered leaving, obviously. It was unbearable—and yet Lyla had no choice but to bear it. After all, what kind of girlfriend would be upset that her partner had gotten free GRS? It had made Tracy so happy. So euphoric. Lyla had a duty to stay and try to be happy along with her. And eventually, to buy her freedom. She couldn’t leave. She just couldn’t. She had given Tracy her heart long ago, and never looked back.

They were in love. That was the final word. Then it got worse.

Speyka spirited Tracy away yet again. Lyla was left alone for the night, working late into the evening simply to keep her mind off whatever fresh horror awaited her the next morning. She collapsed onto the couch and into sleep the moment she returned home, and the sound of a key turning in the front door was what brought her back to wakefulness in the morning.

“Lyla?” Tracy called out. “I’m home!”

Lyla put her full weight behind that now-familiar forced smile as she clambered to her feet and headed for the door, dreading the discovery of which part of her girlfriend’s body she was now incapable of touching. Her ass? Her hips? Maybe her stomach?

When she reached the entranceway, she froze in her tracks.

Speyka stood there in the doorway, their usual, inhumanly sleazy self. But beside them was a woman with no face at all—or at least, that was how she appeared to Lyla. Instead of eyes, a nose, or a mouth, or indeed any specific features at all, there seemed to be nothing to her face at all except for a blurred mosaic-haze of indistinct, gray shapes that shifted every time she moved like static on an old TV. The effect was hauntingly unnatural, and made Lyla’s head pound the harder she stared.

“Tracy?” Lyla called out, stomach already curdling. “W-where are you?”

“I’m right here, silly!” came Tracy’s giddy, happy voice from behind the blur. “It’s still me! Just, new and improved. So, what do you think, babe?”

Lyla’s stomach dropped.

She’d known immediately, of course, who she was looking at. There were a thousand clues: her height, her build, her clothes. But all the same, Lyla had been trying to cling to a few fleeting moments of incoherent denial. As those faded, the rest of her being seemed to fall into the cavernous void aching behind her ribs.

“I… I… I c-can’t…” she whimpered.

“She can’t see, doll,” Speyka cut in, with cutting derision.

“Oh! Right.” Tracy giggled from behind her censored face, too high on cloud nine to notice Lyla’s dismay. “Well, Speyka took care of my facial feminization surgery!”

***

“See, doll, the whole point of a cunt is touching. Fingering, licking, fucking. That’s what it’s for—and since I have exclusive rights to your girlfriend’s, that means hands off. But a face? That’s different. A face is for being seen. It’s an image. You’ve heard of likeness rights, right? Same deal. I own Tracy’s face. That means no looking. Got it?”

Over the following weeks, Speyka’s chirped explanation played on a loop through Lyla’s head. Lyla kept picking through the words and the logic as if hoping that some legalistic loophole would deliver her from the nightmare she had sunk into. Instead, the more she turned it over, the more her objections slipped through her mind like slick silk and wound up tightening like a noose around her mangled mind. No matter how many times Lyla tried to bargain with herself, it seemed right. It seemed correct. It seemed inevitable. Worse, it seemed normal, like a mere extension of the ruthless calculus of property and copyright that held sway over the whole world. In a few appalling moments, sitting on the couch, watching a movie next to a girlfriend whose face she couldn’t see and whose owned cunt was being dilated by Speyka, it had all seemed distressingly routine.

Which it was, Lyla supposed. It had happened so many times now.

What continued to gnaw at her, though, was the fallibility of her memory. At first, Lyla had been able to reassure herself, however thinly, with the idea that even if Tracy’s face was hidden from her eyes, it would never fade from her mind. Another false hope. She could not even blame Speyka for it. There was nothing unnatural about the way that, as days turned to weeks, the picture of Tracy’s face, enshrined in the locket of her heart, started to fade like moth-eaten fabric until, whenever she closed her eyes and tried to dream of her beloved, all that came to mind was that awful mosaic blur.

In the face of the ever-growing mountain of surgical bills Lyla would need to pay if she wanted to truly and wholly have her girlfriend again, her motivation to go to work had dwindled into nothing. What was the point? For years, as Tracy had struggled to hold down a job, Lyla had pushed herself to cover the bills. For what? For this? It seemed absurd, and despair, saggy and scratchy as their old couch, was eager to claim her. The only comfort she could find, however twisted, was in her girlfriend’s arms. Tracy seemed to pay Lyla less and less mind by the day, but she was not so callous that she would deny Lyla when she pressed against Tracy, making herself small and putting her head to rest in Tracy’s lap, eyes closed so that she did not have to think about what she could not see. Tracy always stiffened strangely, as though uncomfortable, but then Lyla would feel a familiar hand in her hair, or rubbing down her back.

“I’m sorry,” Tracy told Lyla once, as they cuddled. Just once. “I know it isn’t easy on you. I just…”

She never finished the sentence, and the embrace lasted only until Speyka called Tracy away to dilate again.

Then, one day, Tracy announced that she had made a ‘big decision’ that would help Lyla out. Immediately, Lyla was on tenterhooks, but her hope that some of what Speyka had done might be undone proved stillborn. Instead, Tracy vowed that she was going to do something that would help Lyla spread the load when it came to the household’s material needs.

“I’m gonna start doing porn!” Tracy announced brightly. “Now that I’m finally comfortable with my body, why not? I’ve already got everything all set up and figured out—thanks to Speyka, of course.”

Upstairs, the attic creaked. The attic grew.

***

“Watch closely, OK? This is going to be my very first time masturbating with my brand new pussy.”

Tracy’s voice, though compressed by audio processing and distorted by cheap headphones, reached Lyla’s ears as clearly and closely as if she’d been whispering a mere kiss’s distance from her ear. Lyla craned forward, eyes drowning in the glare from her laptop screen, eager to drink in every last detail.

“And it feels so good,” Tracy sighed on screen, voice hitching breathily in intervals that were clearly false, clearly performative, yet that betrayed, somehow, a deeper lust to be a performance. “I can’t believe it. I spent so long wanting a real fuckhole. And now I finally am one.”

She had filmed the video upstairs, in the bedroom she shared with Lyla. It must have been when she was out at work. The setting couldn’t have been more familiar—the eggshell paint on the walls, the chips around the doorframe that revealed plasterboard, the sagging bed—but context transformed it utterly. This wasn’t Lyla’s bedroom anymore. It was a porn set. Fixed and framed by the camera, it had been flattened into a single dimension and carved up into pixels. Three walls were visible in the frame; beyond the fourth was Lyla, watching back the recording. Like any porn set, it was a place within fiction. Unreachable.

“I had my tits done too,” Tracy drawled. She was in repose on the double bed, legs out before her, knees fallen to the sides to expose her naked body. As she spoke, she reached up to cup and grope them for the camera, the very picture of pornographic perfection. “They’re so big now. Anything to be a better fuckdoll for all of you.”

Lyla’s mouth hung open. She was experiencing her girlfriend like never before. Now that she was just one more viewer, she could detach her jealous anxiety for a moment and acknowledge that Tracy had been sculpted into an unspeakable vision. The circumstances were awful, yes, but the result was a blessing. There was more beauty in the world now. Between her legs, yes, and on her chest, but that was not where Lyla was looking. She had eyes only for Tracy’s face.

At last, she could see it.

But only like this. That was what Lyla had discovered. At first, she had signed up to Tracy’s OnlyFans merely out of a half-hearted sense that she ought to support her girlfriend’s new project, however mixed her own feelings about it. Out of mere, impulsive curiosity, she had started watching Tracy’s first big video and the sight of her girlfriend’s face, after weeks of praying for a mere glimpse, had her clutching at the aching hollow of her heart.

Even that, though, proved just another twist of the knife. Lyla’s hope that the curse on her eyes had been lifted was quickly dashed. In the flesh, it was no different. Once Lyla puzzled it out, her heart sank to fresh depths.

Speyka owned Tracy’s face. Her likeness. And Speyka was doing more for Tracy’s incipient porn career than merely offering her a few pointers. She was her benefactor and her manager. A portion of Tracy’s OnlyFans income trickled into Speyka’s pocket. That was why Lyla could see Tracy’s face. Because she had paid the price. It was enough to bring Lyla to tears.

But she did not weep. She simply watched the video. Then again. Then again, and again, and again, and again. It became her sole occupation, punctuated only by the other teasing pictures that Tracy drip-fed to the growing ranks of her subscribers. Lyla couldn’t shake the thought that she was hardly closer to her own girlfriend than all the rest of them. Merely one more profile picture and regular ten-dollar payment among the crowd.

“It gets me off so hard to think about all the people watching. Everyone looking at me. Everyone getting off to me. God, becoming a real girl made me such a slut!”

Still, she kept watching. She needed to. She needed to brand Tracy into her memory and set her glowing anew with each repeat viewing. It was all she had, and it made the little domestic moments all the more bearable when she could, through effort of will, impose her girlfriend’s face over the headache-inducing static that greeted her every time they were together.

And her new face was undeniably beautiful. Speyka’s surgeons truly were miracle-workers. Every last hint of masculine sharpness Tracy had spent so long obsessing over had been worked out of her face, leaving her with the look of a classical model instead of an elfin androgyne. It was exactly what Lyla had wanted for herself, one day. Lyla was happy for Tracy, of course, and happy to have such a gorgeous girlfriend. It pleased her to imagine that beautiful face breaking out into a smile every time Tracy laughed at one of her jokes or glanced in her direction. Even her imagination, though, was poisoned. She had never seen a loving smile on Tracy’s new, surgically-improved face. Only looks of teasing promise or rapturous climax. More and more, she found even her fondest fantasies warped by her growing inability to imagine her girlfriend as anything more than the lustful, doll-like porn star Lyla had spent so long staring at.

“And I really c-can’t wait until I can start using my cunt properly,” Tracy moaned on screen as her hand began working over new lips. “I d-don’t know what they did when they gave it to me, but it’s s-so fucking sensitive. Even dilating d-drives me crazy!”

Now Lyla’s attention was pulled down to the opening between Tracy’s legs, ideally formed and perfectly pleasing. Tracy’s moans grew louder as she pleasured herself. It looked like it felt wonderful. Lyla wanted it so bad.

“For n-now, this is all I can do,” Tracy panted. “Still healing. But I can’t wait to get fucked properly.” Drooling pleasure turned her giggle into a yearning gurgle. “I wonder how it’s gonna happen. I guess my m-manager is gonna have to hook me up with someone.”

Lyla tensed as she braced herself for what came next. It hurt, always, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to skip over even a single moment of the video.

“I have a girlfriend,” Tracy explained. “And she has a dick.” Lyla’s innards clenched. “But s-she might have a l-little, uh, trouble with me.”

Lyla whimpered at Tracy’s giggle. The pain was getting worse and worse. All the same, her hand began drifting down to the spot of tightness at the front of her pants.

“And, God, I r-really need a cock inside me!” Tracy’s hand quickened as the fantasy claimed her. Lyla’s hand fumbled with her zipper. “I n-need my new cunt filled s-sooooo fucking bad!” Her eyes danced as she visibly gave herself to daydreaming about what it would feel like. Lyla found herself imagining the same. Reluctantly, her fist found her hardening shaft. “I bet i-it feels incredible. I’ve been fucked before, but… but… I’m s-so sensitive now! It’s going to drive me c-crazy.”

Again, it was such a performance. Again, Tracy’s genuine relish shone through. Lyla could only imagine what it might have felt like for her girlfriend, experiencing herself that way. As a pure nexus of erotic fascination, untarnished by dysphoria and shame. She could only imagine what it might feel like to touch Tracy the way she touched herself, on screen.

Her hand was pumping overtime. She couldn’t help it. Her imagination was a frenzied eel, writhing uncontrollably between need and abasement, leaving her hands slick.

“Yes… t-that’s… I’m… f-fuck!” Tracy screamed as she took herself over the edge. At the same moment, Lyla’s pleasure peaked. She couldn’t help but save herself for the moment she always knew was coming, at eight minutes forty-four. At least this way, their twinned climax presented the delusion of genuine intimacy.

By the time Lyla crashed back into clarity, the video was over. The screen was black, reflecting only the monstrous humiliation and self-repugnance on Lyla’s face. That, too, was only growing worse. Just like the pleasure. It wasn’t the first time she had masturbated to Tracy’s video. Nor even the tenth.

Unless she did something, it wouldn’t be the last.

Lyla kept that thought as fresh in her mind as the look of contorted pleasure on Tracy’s new face while she cleaned herself off. She was keenly aware that she was sinking still deeper into a state of abject, pathetic misery with each passing day. She hated it, but she couldn’t leave. Not without Tracy. Which left her only one option: confronting Speyka.

After taking just a little time to gather herself, Lyla set off up the stairs to the attic room she and Tracy had let Speyka lodge in. Since then, she had not set foot up there. She’d never had a reason to, and the strange, creaking sounds that often came from up there filled her with trepidation. She’d considered sneaking in while Speyka was out, but the strange lodger’s comings and goings were difficult to track. Now, though, Lyla did nothing to hide her footfalls as she climbed the steep staircase to the top of the house.

“Hey!” she called out as she knocked at the door. “I need to talk to you.”

“Come in, doll,” came the muffled reply. “It’s not locked.”

Lyla summoned her courage, pushed open the door, stepped inside, and found herself immediately lost in her surroundings.

The attic had changed. That much was obvious at a glance, yet Lyla struggled to put a finger on the strange spatial distortion that engulfed her. The attic had always been small and unpleasant, more a roof space than a genuine room, but now it felt huge. Lyla could not make out the surrounding walls, but had the sense of a colossal heart-chamber stretching on without limit. Yet paradoxically, it was no more spacious than before. If anything, its contents made it seem even more oppressively cramped.

All around Lyla was the detritus of life and love. A bizarre hoard of broken objects and misplaced things that, in aggregate, could not have fit into the old attic. Lyla wasn’t sure how they had gotten into the house in the first place. Splintered bedposts and torn mattresses. Shredded love letters and Valentine’s Day cards. Wilted flowers and old chocolates. Faded photos and shattered lockets. All of it and so much more was piled around the room, the objects woven together into a broken-hearted lattice that resembled nothing so much as a monstrous, enormous bird’s nest. Dangling from each exposed protrusion like a shrike’s grisly trophies were wedding rings, the precious metal and faceted diamonds sparkling from amidst the ruin. And hidden deep within the nest, almost out of view, were still worse things. Pallid shapes that seemed to Lyla like calcified organs, and large, life-sized dolls, uncannily realistic and shattered into pieces.

Lyla had never seen or heard of anything like it. It defied all reason, and her most basic sense of what was physically possible. Yet seeing was believing, and with the room drowning her, there was no point languishing in skepticism. She had come for something more important, and her purpose was staring her in the face. At the very heart of the awful room was Speyka. The magpie creature sat behind a desk in a little, cleared nook, hemmed in on all sides by their mountains of shiny trophies. They were, as usual, in their odd, feathered suit, and on their desk was a typewriter and a stack of papers. They pecked at the keys every now and then, each time eliciting a thunderous clack that her messy nest failed to absorb.

“What the fuck…” Lyla breathed.

“Come closer, doll,” Speyka insisted, beckoning her forth with a hooked talon. Their claws were longer than before. They no longer resembled fingernails in the slightest. “Let’s negotiate.”

With some reluctance, Lyla followed the single, crooked path through the chaos that took her to the spot before Speyka’s desk. The benefactor looked up at her, and Lyla felt the malice of eons burning from within their amber, inhuman eyes. Lyla had never before believed in devils or faeries. But she did now, and it was, if anything, a relief that suddenly she could truly understand what had happened to her and her girlfriend.

“What are you?” she whispered, in the hope of putting a name to this evil.

Speyka shrugged and considered for a moment. “A collector,” they answered finally. “One with well-honed tastes. Your girlfriend’s desperation spoke to me, doll. So does yours.”

“My…” Lyla shivered, the insight in the monster’s eyes aborting her other line of questioning. “You know what I want?”

Speyka licked their lips. “I have a pretty good idea.”

“Then… what do you say?” Lyla put to the creature.

“Oh, doll!” Speyka squawked a laugh. “Let me give you one piece of advice. With me, you don’t want to leave anything to implication. Best you say it out loud, and be extremely specific. Best you ask nicely.”

“I want…” Lyla balled her hands into fists—then relaxed them, and as she did, she let go of all her dreams of rescuing Tracy. Of buying her freedom like some dashing savior. She wasn’t a hero. She was so much worse than she’d been able to face up to, until the moment she caught a mere whiff of satiation for the desperate, jealous need that had been growing inside her like a cancer. “I want to be like Tracy. I want everything you did for her, but for me. You can have it all. I don’t care. I just need it.” Speyka remained silent for a moment, and the rest of Lyla’s pride fell to splinters. “Please.”

“That’s better,” Speyka cooed. They pecked at their typewriter for a few moments, then looked up again. “I can do it, of course. My surgeons—if you’d call them that, anyway—can modify your body any way you’d like. Or rather, any way I’d like. It’s just a question of the price.”

Lyla shivered at the mere prospect, but then went still. “The price? I thought it was that you’d own me.”

“Hardly,” Speyka sneered. The tail of their suit seemed almost to be growing out behind them, fanning into a fine plumage. “That’s commerce. What’s paid for is bought—but I need a reason to make the deal. A little hint of sugar.”

Lyla swallowed spit. “What was Tracy’s?”

“Are you sure you want to find out, doll?”

What Lyla wanted was besides the point. She had come this far. “Tell me.”

In reply, Speyka reached down and opened one of the drawers under their desk. From within, they plucked out nothing more or less than a human heart, bloodless and already mottling white as if turning to marble. As she looked at it, Lyla felt that distinct, gnawing hollowness in her chest, now familiar, throb longingly. How long since she had felt her heart sing, or leap, or beat?

“Yours, of course,” Speyka confirmed. “And given to your darling Tracy for so small a price. Didn’t you wonder why you couldn’t leave? Why you couldn’t stop loving her?” They turned Lyla’s heart over in their hand for a moment, then reached within one of its chambers to pluck at a stray spring. “How could you? Your heart is no longer Tracy’s to lose.”

Lyla could not peel her eyes away from the grisly trophy in Speyka’s hand. She should have been agonized by Tracy’s betrayal, but she wasn’t. In her shoes, she might have done the same thing. Wasn’t she at that very moment?

“Then… what can I…” Lyla cast about frantically. “Hers?”

“I’m afraid that ship sailed a while ago, doll,” Speyka replied. The space where Lyla’s heart had been sank, though she’d suspected as much

“What, then?” she asked despairingly. “Is there anything?”

“Of course.” Speyka flashed teeth. “You know, you and Tracy have quite the bright future together. Even now, believe it or not. Love in the face of adversity and betrayal is a powerful thing. You really could save her. Buy her back. Win her heart anew. You could get married! Of course, there’s no telling when you’d be able to afford any of the surgeries you so crave. It could be decades, if it ever happens. It’ll be a future of toil and hardship to be sure, with happiness only coming at the end of a long, long road, but all the same, it’s one I’d love to have in my collection. And it’d buy you my very finest work. How does that sound?”

A bright future, surrendered to this magpie? Besides, how did that even work? What did selling a future mean? What did any of this mean? Lyla was still getting to grips with the fact that entities like Speyka existed at all. Amidst her doubts and questions, it should have been a hard choice—except that Lyla could scarcely bring herself to imagine any future for herself at all, in a body like the one she still had. She’d had her fill of toil and hardship. She wanted the euphoria she had seen on Tracy’s face every single day, before that, too, had been lost to her. She wanted a single moment of feeling comfortable in her own skin. And for that, she’d gladly give her future in trade.

“My future, for the best body your surgeons can give me?” Lyla intoned slowly. She drew breath, then sealed her fate. “It’s a deal.”

Something shifted. It was like great wings were suddenly beating against the attic’s stale air. It was like the entire room was laughing.

“Wonderful!” Before Lyla could think better of her choice, Speyka clapped their hands in delight, struck a few more keys of her typewriter, then tore off the page they had been writing. They presented it to Lyla; it was a contract, awaiting her signature. Speyka plucked a feather from their plumage-suit, and blood dripped like ink from its quill tip. “After you satisfy yourself about the particulars, of course.”

Lyla stared at the contract for a moment. Beyond a few terms and conditions, written in archaic legalese, the terms seemed plain as day, and they were precisely the words Lyla had just spoken. Her future, for the best body Speyka could give her. What was there to complain about?

She took the quill and signed on the dotted line. A sense of curious peace washed over her. If her future had changed or died, she couldn’t tell.

“So,” Lyla said, with feigned bravado. “When do we get started?”

This time, with her heart utterly gone, it was her stomach that dropped when Speyka threw back their head and let loose an awful, cackling laugh.

“Oh, doll,” the magpie demon replied once they had recovered, plucking the contract from Lyla’s hands and appending their own signature. “Didn’t I warn you? You really, really needed to be more specific.”

***

Lyla rested on a filthy mattress somewhere within Speyka’s nest and fucked herself as she watched Tracy get fucked on camera.

That was her life now. She had nothing else. She had sold her future—and along with it, apparently, all sense of drive to do otherwise, or be more.

The body Speyka had furnished her with provided cold consolation. The best Speyka could furnish her with, as stipulated. But ‘best’, as Lyla had come to appreciate, was a matter of interpretation. She had a perfect face, and perfect tits, and a perfect ass, each demarcated with the same scars she could still see fading on Tracy’s skin. All of that, though, was secondary to the fact that what was between her legs was as discomforting as it always had been. She still had the cock she had always hated. Only now, thanks to Speyka’s meddling, it was entirely nonfunctional.

Speyka’s very best work. Supreme in the cruelty of its craftsmanship. A defensive patent, they called it mockingly.

The term was fitting, Lyla had to concede. Now, however anguished she might be, she was not even fit to provide a hard-on like the one that she currently watched filling Tracy’s prized cunt. Their severance was total. As promised and agreed, Speyka held all of Lyla’s heart in her hand, and had bled it dry. Now Lyla was nothing more than this—the mere vestige of a person, steadily calcifying into an anguished, porcelain doll that would linger in Speyka’s abhorrent nest until she lost her shine and dwindled to dust. Facing her very annihilation, Lyla could bring herself to do no more than fuck herself with a plastic cock and pretend it was in her non-existent cunt instead of her ass, while she watched porn vids of other women fucking the love of her life.

Time itself lost its sense. Hours became days became weeks became months, and all of it was consumed with frenzied self-pleasure that lasted from the moment she woke until the moment she surrendered to exhaustion, and began again as soon as her eyes opened. Why would she do otherwise?

She had no future, and no heart.

There was still, of course, a sense of rhythm and disparity to her new existence, as inescapable as the tides. After each numbing surge came the backwash of clarity. A dawning sense of horror and grief at all Lyla had lost and become. But she had no future. She had no hope, and thus no rejoinder to her own misery and dysphoria other than to drown herself anew in a fresh round of gratification until she was again cresting a white-capped wave of giddy pleasure, and nothing mattered but the coming crash.

And again. And again. And again. And again. There was nothing besides.

Her eyes beheld nothing beyond her laptop screen, and on it, a growing catalog of images and videos. Tracy starred in them all, naturally. Lyla had no interest in anyone else. Only in vicariously re-engraving the impression of a face she would never herself see, and a pleasure she would never herself know. A new post was always the source of some fleeting eagerness, before that, too, became a matter of rote. One more piece of titillation on the ever-whirling carousel of pornography that had become the focal point of Lyla’s contracting existence. Old favorites would return, sometimes, as Lyla scrolled through her girlfriend’s profile in search of a spark with which to light her own fuse. Sometimes even that very first video, now modest and amateurish compared to the heights of pornographic splendor to which Tracy had soared. Each time, Lyla greeted it with the eager warmth of true reunion. No despair burned so hot in her belly as what that particular clip inspired. Nothing else drove the hand working the dildo inside of her ass into such mania.

Speyka passed by, sometimes, inspecting their nest of stolen treasures inside that space beyond space which seemed to move from house to house from week to week, but she paid Lyla less and less attention with time, as fresher and shinier trophies caught her eye. Though once, in perhaps the last remaining discrete event of Lyla’s fading existence, they distracted Lyla from her masturbation by carefully setting something in place just beyond Lyla’s reach, hanging from a stray piece of driftwood from another victim’s ruined life.

“There,” Speyka crowed, as they turned their back. “The future you traded. Nice and bright. I hope it was worth it, doll.”

Through eyes fogged over from noxious bliss, Lyla peered at the item. Eventually, she saw that it was a wedding ring, bright and beautiful even though it was little more than a plain, white gold band, free of further ornamentation. The kind of thing that Tracy might have given her, or she Tracy, in a different life, to be forever worn and treasured despite its humility. The symbol of a stillborn future.

But as Lyla started fucking herself again, it faded to little more than a blurred, yonic opening, taunting her from afar with the hopeless prospect that she might slide it onto her finger and thereby reclaim all she had surrendered—if only she could tear herself away from Tracy’s porn for a single instant. But she could not. Not ever. She had no future. She had sold it, and all for this. All for nothing.

And the wedding ring that never was? Merely another hole Lyla would never get to touch.

——————————

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And my deepest possible thanks to Sarah and Olivka for beta reading this story for me!